Using trust and possibilistic reasoning to deal with untrustworthy communication in VANETs

VANETs allow for unprecedented amounts of information to be sent between participants in traffic. Unfortunately, without countermeasures, they also allow selfish agents to take advantage of communication to improve their own utility. In this paper we present a novel framework for dealing with potentially untrustworthy information. The framework consists primarily of two components: a computational trust model for estimating the amount of uncertainty in received information and a possibilistic beliefs-desires-intentions agent system for reasoning about this uncertain information in order to achieve the driver´s goals. We demonstrate the framework´s effectiveness in an easy to understand but realistic scenario of a freeway system in which we also show that deceit may have a larger impact on traffic flow than previously thought.